jrearick's blog

While I was in Portland for DrupalCon, Gaila managed to wreck the Kia. She is fine aside from a bit of a bruse from the seatbelt. The other car had no damage. The Kia was determined to be totaled (just barely). So we took this opportunity to upgrade our vehicle. We ended up with a 2012 Ford Focus. It's newer, has more features, and better gas mileage. Plus we got below 2% intrest on the loan.

I finally got around to replacing my 5 year old MacBook pro with a brand new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The new machine is maxed out with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. The thing boots in just a few seconds and wakes from sleep instantly. Compared to my old computer, the drive is twice as big and is SSD instead of a 5400 RPM ATA drive. It also has 4x the RAM.

The Retina Display is very nice and makes my 20" Apple Cinema Display look like crap. The attached image shows this website in the iPad with Retina Display simulator, actual pixel for pixel (it doesn't quite fit in portrait).

We have movie posters mounted and installed in our basement entertainment area. It has been our weekend project the past couple of weeks acquiring the posters via the campus poster sale and eBay, plus ordering frames and mattes to make all the posters fit in the same size and spacing. We wanted it to look halfway decent. I think we are satisfied with the results.

The list of movies:

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Star Wars

Lord of the Rings

Airplane!

Spaceballs

Robin Hood: Men in Tights

The Horse Whisperer

Shawshank Redemption

The Blues Brothers

Ghost Busters - Glows in the dark

Ferris Buller's Day Off

WALL-E

I wanted to get "Back To The Future" in the mix, but aparently Gaila doesn't like it for some reason. I believe I comprimised to get "Ferris Buller's Day Off" with "The Horse Whisperer."

Next on the list of things to do down there is finish the trim work and get a surround sound system.

Friday night, August 26th, my Taurus finally kicked the bucket at I-235 and 19th st in Des Moines. In the last couple years it has been in the shop for numerous cooling system repairs. One of the coolant hoses ruptured and my engine over heated. We had to get an after-hours tow and get a ride back home form my dad who was coincidently in town. Also, many tanks to Gaila's aunt and uncle for entertaining us for the evening.

The shop in Des Moines fixed the ruptured hose and found because of the overheating I had blown the head gasket. A repair that would take over 10 hours of labor, pushing the repair cost to over the value of the working car. I ended up striping the after market audio system and junking the car for $250.

I've driven this car since my leaner's permit back in 1998 and only about 40,000 miles on it. Since then I put it through 100,000 miles of use. As recently as the summer of 2009 I drove it 1,000 miles out to my brother's wedding in Penn Yan, NY. It has been to Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis and an infinite number of places in between. Almost every other weekend in the fall 2004 I drove it to Yankton, SD through the winding roads of the loess hills to spend time with my future wife. The best way to identify the car was the trailer hitch that was used more for bruising shins than for hauling the fold down camper. The best picture of the Taurus I could find was when a deer ran into it.

Last Saturday I bought a new (to me) car. A 2006 Kia Spectra with only 45,000 miles on it. I still need to get an antenna and cruse control installed as part of the deal. Then I need to figure out how to install auxiliary audio so I can play my podcasts from my iPhone on my commute.

I hope to run this one for at least another 100,000 miles and more than 15 years.

I got mod_security from EPEL for my RHEL 5 setup. Apparently the binary you get from EPEL was compiled with the switch -DDISABLE_HTACCESS_CONFIG. I have been pulling my hair trying to get Apache to not throw an error 500 every time I wanted to selectively put in any mod_security directives. I ended up just throwing the directives directly into the VirtualHost or other context and reloading Apache.

Google had a hard time finding the problem, so I hope this blog post will help someone else.

I've seen QR codes popping up in the last few months. When I first encountered it in the wild, I saw a 2-D barcode and thought why it was so prominent on the advertising. I've seen 2-D barcodes on other things such as my at&t bill that turns out to be some sort of reference number. Being a geeky person, I decided to see if there was a 2-D barcode reader for iPhone and actually see what data was encoded in these codes.

Turns out an app I had that scans regular 1-D UPC barcodes could also scan QR codes (I had to enable QR for RedLaser by going to the Settings app). The first code in the wild I scanned was at Jeff's Pizza. I figured it might be a coupon or some sort of interesting information. I was disappointed that it was just a geo-location that brought up a non-mobile version of Google Maps. Not really a good experience.

Later I received a flyer in the mail for Cyclone basketball. On it was a QR code to scan to win a pair of tickets to a game of my choice. I won, but the experience of filling out the information on my mobile browser was not optimized for a mobile device (thank god it didn't require flash).

There are so many things you can do with QR codes. If done right, it can be a positive experience for the user. Since an encoded URL is not really seen by the user on the print, you can easily embed campaign codes to better track your advertising effectiveness. It also makes it much easier for the user to get additional information and engage the user in your message. However, if it is not done right, it may be confusing or even be a detriment a person's opinion of your message as it was for my first experiences with QR codes.

I've put together a few notes that might help people implement QR codes effectively:

Since a lot of people don't know what a QR code is, perhaps offer instructions and a link to download a scanner somewhere near the code.

Make sure you label your code with a call to action so the user knows what scanning the code will get them. "Scan this for today's coupon!". Just throwing a QR code up because it's the hip thing to do is not going to be effective.

If you are linking to a website, make sure it is mobile optimized. You want to make it as easy as possible for your user to find the information they are looking for. If they have to zoom, scroll, and navigate to get the information they are looking for, you are going to lose them.

I'm sure there are other things that can make using QR codes easier and more fun, but following the points above will put you well ahead of most of the implementations I've seen so far.

Here is my plan for accomplishing these goals/resolutions. A few of them, I may need your help.

Play Xbox on a regular basis with my brother

Set a recurring time, hopefully on a weekly basis, to play.

iPod connection to my car stereo

Need to figure out how to get to the back of my deck to plug into the AUX input. If anyone can help me that would be great, otherwise I will take it into a car audio place and have them show me how to do it.

Do a website for hire (outside of work)

Anyone have any leads? Don't really want to advertise on Craig's List. Would like to work for a local small business.

It has been almost a decade since I've wanted to start learning Cocoa.

Set aside a couple hours every Saturday. Let it grow from there

Give a presentation at Cocoaheads (dependent on above)

See above

Be physically active at least once a week

Does anyone want to go bowling or something once a week? Perhaps Frisbee Golf when the weather gets better?

Be less anti-social. Hang out with friends more often.

Could kill this one with the above. Also, now that the bar is done I should just invite people over.

Get or build a new desk for my office

May have to wait 'til spring to be able to work in the garage. For now, make some measurements and look at perhaps a trip to Ikea?

Gaila and I finished a bunch of work on the bar just before New Years. It has been functional for about a year, but we never got motivated to finish. Now, all that is left is a little bit of trim work. The rest of the room still needs some movie posters and the media center area needs some rejiggering. Check out the pics:

It's 2011 and there are still no flying cars. Weren't we supposed to have those 10 years ago?

When I was in school, I used to do a sumer goals list on here. Now that summers are not full of free-time, I've stopped doing summer goals. It has been more than a year since we bought our house and I feel like I've gotten into a rut. So, I guess I'll hop on the bandwagon of doing new year's resolutions. So, without further adieu, a list in no particular order.

Play Xbox on a regular basis with my brother

iPod connection to my car stereo

Do a website for hire (outside of work)

It has been almost a decade since I've wanted to start learning Cocoa. Set aside a couple hours each week to sit down and learn Cocoa

Give a presentation at Cocoaheads (dependent on above)

Be physically active at least once a week (not sure how to do this in the winter)

Be less anti-social. Hang out with friends more often.

Get or build a new desk for my office

Get rid of clutter and items we don't use anymore

Visit my brother in Philly

I will have to follow up on this to create a plan for how to attain these goals.